The transition from consciousness to the inner sanctuary of his own soul domain was rarely a gentle affair, but tonight it felt like a personal insult.
Elias groaned, his eyelids feeling as though they were lined with lead, his entire physical frame aching from the grueling emotional and physical weight of the meeting with Raileigh all the way to the lantern festival. He had barely managed to drift off into a merciful, dreamless sleep—having successfully warded off Jamie's endless nocturnal chatter by reciting an absurdly convoluted, rambling folk tale from his old world until her eyes finally glazed over and she slumped into a heavy snore.
He had craved rest above all else.
A deep, uninterrupted, absolute oblivion.
Instead, he found himself lying face-up on the soft, manicured turf beneath the sprawling branches of the golden cherry blossoms, their luminous amber petals drifting lazily through the ethereal wind.
His eyes snapped open, a scowl instantly twisting his features.
"Are you kidding me..." he muttered, his voice echoing hollowly across the expanse of his own Spirit Domain.
He was clearly not pleased.
He was completely, utterly exhausted. If he had been dragged here into his inner domain against his will, it meant only one thing: that damned fox spirit had meddled with the psychic tether linking them to bring him here.
Deciding that ignorance was his best defense, Elias let out a heavy sigh, turned flatly onto his side, and pulled the phantom grass up around his ears, trying desperately to force himself back to sleep. But the stubborn reality of his current state quickly mocked him.
Here, within the layered boundaries of his Spirit Domain, he was nothing more than a soul. And souls didn't sleep.
There was no biological fatigue to placate, no muscle ache to soothe—only the nagging, hyper-aware consciousness of a mind that desperately wanted to shut down but was barred from doing so.
"Damn it all to hell," he grumbled, his irritation flaring hot beneath his skin.
Groaning and muttering obscenities under his breath, he dragged himself to his feet, dusting off his spectral clothes. He began the long, tedious trek toward the towering, multi-tiered pagoda palace that dominated the center of his domain.
"Tamamo!" he bellowed, his voice laced with venomous annoyance as he stomped across the obsidian courtyards.
"Get out here right now! What in the bloody hell are you disturbing me for?!"
His march took him upward through the labyrinthine interior of the palace. He threw open doors and stalked through every single room on every single level. The lower chambers were silent, echoing with the ghostly whispers of memories he rarely visited; the middle halls hummed with dormant spiritual energy, flickering with flow. But there was no sign of her in the libraries, no lounge where she usually lounged with a mocking smirk. He entered a bathroom where there was a ready hot spring made from his energy but she wasn't here either.
He kept climbing, his feet clattering against the spiraling stone stairwells until he reached the very apex—the highest observation balcony of the highest tower.
There she stood.
She was positioned near the open, wind-swept archway, looking down toward the courtyard he had just vacated. But something was profoundly wrong. The Presence radiating from her was suffocatingly heavy, thick with and icy. Elias' eyes narrowed as he Involuntarily used synesthesia. She was exuding two very strong emotions
Rage
And dread.
Her crimson eyes were glowing like twin embers in the gloom, her her pupils vertical slits and her face was cast entirely in deep, menacing shadow. Her fox ears were pinned rigidly forward, twitching with hyper-sensitive attention, while her multiple fluffy tails slowly lashed back and forth behind her with a rigid, terrifying seriousness.
Like a fox, locked onto a mouse.
Elias stopped dead in his tracks, his initial wave of sleepy fury instantly freezing in his chest. Her oppressive Presence clawed at the back of his neck, sending a fresh spike of adrenaline through his system.
"Hey," Elias began, his voice losing its thunderous edge, though he tried to maintain a veneer of defiant annoyance.
"Are you deaf? I asked you what the hell you're dragging me in here for. In fact, the very idea that you can just arbitrarily yank a mortal consciousness into its own spirit domain whenever you feel like throwing a tantrum is completely absurd—"
He paused.
Tamamo didn't blink. She didn't offer a snarky retort, didn't cross her arms with a teasing grin, didn't even twitch in amusement. She just stared at him with that unblinking, horrifyingly serious expression, her crimson gaze drilling straight through his soul.
Elias swallowed hard, a nervous twitch hitting his left eye. He tried to crack a ragged, awkward joke to break the suffocating tension, flashing a lopsided grin.
"What, did one of your precious spirit tails catch fire? Come on, stop glaring at me like that. It's creeping me out, Tamamo. Seriously, cut it out."
Still, she remained entirely motionless. Then, her lips parted, and the words that dropped from them felt like blocks of falling ice.
"How do you know the names Angram and Erynn?"
The question hit Elias like a physical blow to the stomach. The breath completely vanished from his lungs.
In an instant, the gears in his mind spun into overdrive, crashing violently against the cold, terrifying realization. Earlier today, he had asked Raileigh about those names. But the systemic laws of this world seemed to have automatically redacted the sound, shielding Raileigh's ears from hearing them. Elias had assumed the names were successfully muffled, hidden away in the safety of obscurity.
He had completely forgotten that Tamamo existed on an infinitely higher plane of existence. She was a Divine Beast and thus possessed an awareness that transcended the redactions. She had heard them loud and clear.
He had spent weeks, months, keeping those phantom visions, those cryptic, bleeding memories strictly secret from her, paranoid of what they meant. And now, with one careless, exhausted slip of the tongue, he had completely outed himself.
For a split second, a frantic, desperate thought crossed his mind:
'Should I could lie?' He contemplated weaving a quick fabrication, testing the waters of deception.
But looking at the terrifying, unyielding intensity in her glowing crimson eyes, and feeling the crushing weight of his own absolute exhaustion, he knew it was futile. She had heard him. There was no unringing this bell.
Defeat settled over him, cold and heavy. He let out a long, shuddering breath, his shoulders slumping.
"Fine," Elias muttered, raising his hands in a gesture of reluctant surrender.
"You caught me."
He stepped closer, leaning against a stone pillar to steady himself.
"For a while now... I've been seeing things. Visions. About some boy named Angram who was cast out from his clan for being too nosy. Initially, I completely brushed it off as some bizarre dream one sometimes gets every once in a while. But as the visions became more frequent, and I started noticing a terrifying consistency in the timeline, I realized there's far more to this than meets the eye."
Tamamo's ears flicked, her voice dropping to a harsh, dangerous whisper.
"Do you even know the source of those memories, boy?"
"They're connected to Deus," Elias frowned and answered evenly.
At that single word, Tamamo took a sudden, violent step forward. The movement was so fast, so brimming with predatory intent, that a sharp chill raced straight up Elias's spine. Every instinct in his body screamed at him to flee, but he forced his heels into the stone, holding his ground.
"Why didn't you tell me?" she hissed, her voice vibrating with a genuine, unadulterated anger that he had never heard from her before. She took another step.
"Why the hell should I have told you?" Elias snapped back, a flash of defensive pride flaring up.
"As far as I know you're hiding your own agenda. You did say you're the make of discord and whatnot. Why shoul—"
At this point she was already close enough and didn't hesitate to grab him, her fingers bunching up into the fabric of his collar and violently hauling him off his feet. She slammed him against the stone pillar, her face inches from his, her crimson eyes blazing with a mixture of fury and absolute panic.
"Do you have any idea how close you came to getting us both killed?!" she screamed, shaking him roughly.
"When a True Name is spoken aloud—even whispered—the entity bearing that name is instantly alerted! Even at the lower levels, If they are sensitive enough, they can lock onto the speaker even without meaning to.
"I—"
"Why do you think a person appears when their name is being mentioned or they are being talked about, huh?! Where do you think the saying 'speak of the devil' came from?!"
Elias grimaced, reaching up to violently pry her hands off his collar, shoving her back a step with a burst of indignant strength.
"Alright, alright, get off me! It doesn't always happen like that, and besides, why are you losing your mind over this? The words were redacted by the world's own safety measures anyway!"
"They were redacted because I intercepted them!" Tamamo shrieked, her voice cracking with hysteria as she slammed her fist against the stone balustrade breaking it.
"I had to use my own latent authority and even then we are lucky! You two were mentioning names willy nilly so the entire area was on the radar of those involved! I a able to be hidden because you have so much energy but at that moment your output was drained so I was also exposed. What the bloody hell do you think would happen if they decided to scrutinize you at that exact moment and noticed me hiding inside you?!"
She leaned in close, whispering the horrific reality into his face.
"It wouldn't be a fight, Elias. It would be instant, total incineration. Your soul, my essence, this entire domain—wiped out of existence in less than a heartbeat!"
The blood drained entirely from Elias's face.
The raw, unfiltered terror in Tamamo's voice wasn't an act. There was no teasing edge, no arrogant smirk, no hidden manipulation—just pure, naked survival instinct. The crushing gravity of his recklessness finally crashed down on him. He had played with fire in a powder keg, assuming his ignorance protected him, completely oblivious to the cosmic tripwire he had just trampled over.
A heavy, sickening knot formed in his stomach.
'I was an idiot,' he berated himself internally, his hands curling into tight fists.
'I need to be infinitely more careful with what I say from now on. Wait, does that mean Deus hears me cussing him every time? Good.'
The thought caused Elias to smirk a it and he turned his attention back at her.
"I... I understand. I messed up. I won't be that careless again."
Tamamo stared at him for a long, agonizing moment, her chest heaving as she fought to rein in her frayed nerves. She glared at him, clearly still wanting to tear into him for his monumental stupidity, but let out a long, ragged sigh, running a hand down her face.
"You are a shrewd creature Elias so I am going to believe this was just a catastrophic mistake born of ignorance. To err is human. We're lucky they can't peer into individual spirit domains."
Her crimson eyes narrowed slightly, fixing him with a piercing, non-negotiable stare.
"But hear me this time: from now on, any scrap of knowledge, any vision, any stray memory or name that touches your mind—you report it to me immediately. No holding back. No keeping secrets."
Elias instinctively bristled, crossing his arms.
" Now you're asking for complete open-book access to my head? You want me to just hand over every single private thought—"
Before he could finish protesting, Tamamo lunged forward once more, grabbing him by the collar with terrifying speed and effortlessly lifting him completely off the floor.
Her face was inches from his, cold and dead serious.
"Come on, what's with you and lifting me off the ground?"
"Stop being a fool, Elias!" she snarled, her voice dropping to a venomous whisper.
"Do you think I enjoy being in hiding? You may not understand the gravity of what's happening but I do not care! I did not spend millennia waiting for freedom only to be destroyed because of a human's carelessness"
Her expression softening just a fraction, revealing the chilling vulnerability beneath her fierce exterior as she slowly let him down, though her hands still remained on his collar.
"I am selfish by nature, Elias. My survival depends entirely on this fragile partnership with you. So I will selfishly protect the pact we made, and I will help you break free of this rigged system. But to do that, I need your absolute, unhesitating cooperation. And that includes every single piece of information you stumble across. Do you understand me?"
Elias stared at her. He saw the fear behind her anger, the desperation beneath her composure. She was not just annoyed. She was being sincere.
'Or showing how good of an actress she is.' Elias though with a sigh.
"Okay," he said quietly. "I promise."
Tamamo held his gaze for a moment longer then the tense, suffocating Prsesnce around her began to recede, replaced once again by her usual, albeit slightly strained, demeanor.
With a soft sigh, she leaned forward, resting her head lightly against his chest as if she needed to physically ground herself to his heartbeat.
"You're so troublesome," she muttered, her voice suddenly lighter. "I'm stuck with such a troublesome partner."
Elias blinked. "You're... hugging me?"
"Don't flatter yourself. I'm just tired."
She stayed there for a moment longer, then straightened, her usual smirk returning to her lips.
"If the memories are flowing into you, it means their authorities are weakening. The Sephirot... it's beginning to collapse from the inside out."
Elias frowned. "What?"
He paused, his curiosity piercing through the confusion.
"What are you talking about? And now that you mention it, how did Angram become Deus... and how did Erynn become Laplace?"
She didn't answer and instead just let go of him.
"Hey..."
He opened his mouth to press her for answers, but before she could elaborate, a distant, muffled sound began to bleed into his consciousness.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
It wasn't coming from within his mind domain. It was external, vibrating through the physical layers of his reality.
"Elias. Oi, Elias, wake up."
A rough, persistent hand began shaking his shoulder.
"Come on man, now's not the time to sleep. Get up."
Elias's eyes fluttered. The golden cherry blossoms, the towering obsidian pagoda, and Tamamo's fragile, leaning form abruptly dissolved into a swirl of fading starlight.
He groaned loudly, his physical body dragging him back into the waking world with a crushing wave of mental fatigue. He sleepily turned his head away from the intrusive sunlight streaming through the bedroom window, pulling the heavy wool blanket up over his face.
"Go away..." he mumbled, his voice thick with exhaustion as he tried to worm his way back down into a comfortable sleeping position.
Spread beside him on the mattress, Jamie was still snoring soundly, her mouth slightly open and drool pooling out, completely dead to the world despite the commotion.
Standing over him with an exasperated grin was Raileigh, giving his shoulder another firm shake.
"Five more minutes." Elias groaned again.
"I'm being serious Elias, something terrible has happened."